


Jeeves and the Wedding Bell Blues

by godsdaisiechain (preux)



Series: Wedding Bell Blues [1]
Category: Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Reunions, Separations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-18
Updated: 2012-08-18
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:05:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preux/pseuds/godsdaisiechain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following a queerfest prompt  (OK, half of a queerfest prompt): Bertie ends up in a sexual situation with a woman for the first time, with disastrous results. In fact, he found the whole affair rather distasteful.</p><p>Bertie gets sunk in the matrimonial soup.  Can Jeeves help him manage the wedding night?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jeeves and the Wedding Bell Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Bertie Wooster and the Carnal Feelings](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/10974) by Saylee. 



> There is some violence, but it is not terribly graphic.

**Bertie**

In the heady days when Jeeves held sway around the roost at Berkeley Mansions, I never thought the day would come that one Bertram Wilberforce Wooster would wind up in the matrimonial soup, but the h. d.s had come to an end for some dashed unclear reason and before you could say ‘bobsyouruncle,’ Bertram had been fairly well caught by a little slip of a thing named Tegwynne—her mother was Welsh I believe.  She was a delightfully willowy, blonde pipperino who, like Florence Craye, had turned out somewhat unenticing on better acquaintance, except that my own T. was considerably less good tempered and gentle.

Ah, Wooster found himself thinking fondly of the days when he had been engaged to the more much even-tempered and affectionate ‘Lady Caligula,’ whose worse sin was to make him read Spinoza or even to Honoria Glossop who rather liked me even if she did leave accidental welts about the willowy frame. Alas, those days were no more. Jeeves had gone and I was unable to reach him through the Junior Ganymedes before the big day. It had been my hope that he would either save me or be my Best Man, a post performed admirably and well by Oofy Prosser.

The less, or more, astute and discerning reader may at this point be saying, “What? No Jeeves? Dashed unclear reason? Pray, whatever is transposing, no transpiring, Wooster? Dash this medias res bally nonsense and get to the goods, blast it!”  And right the l, or m., a. and d. reader would be.  

The sad truth of the matter is that Jeeves and Wooster had come to a most welcome understanding very shortly into our professional life together, but after a dozen or so years, we had to face the more unpleasant realities of the sitch.  When we first met, the whole chaps-with-chaps wheeze was viewed as a rather cute and entertaining thing by most folks in the metrop, but after a while the heady breezes of roaring freedom changed, stock markets crashed and tolerance was at a very low ebb.  One of Jeeves’s good pals was bunged in chokey on suspicion and he told me that it would not do.  He would not remain to endanger me.  The heart shattered into a million, million pieces, the more so because he was just as cut up as I was, perhaps even more so.  I tried to convince him that we should settle in Paris until everything blew over, but he feared for his family, and I could not be so selfish as to ask him to stay.  He biffed off, maintaining a post as my part-time secretary and quietly shielded all of my money from incursions and encroachments and other types of invasions. It had been a year, and we met quarterly for lunch at his club. It started out more frequent, but we were too torn to bits to continue seeing each other so frequently.  Usually I could reach him within a week or so through the Junior Ganymedes, but when I wrote, about six weeks before the wedding, I did not hear back from him.  I tried again, but they had been unable to find him.

Tegwynne’s father was some sort of American millionaire, associated with dog food or toothpicks or possibly some type of food topping.  Whatever it was seemed dashed boring. They organized a bally huge wedding, with hundreds of people and lashings of champagne and whatnot.  I managed to get through the day without grimacing or weeping, even when that cove Roger, an old flame of Tegwynne’s, took the Wooster paw in a crushing grip and threatened all sorts of bodily harms should she not appear glowingly happy whenever he saw her. The Pop, Mr. Rourke, had forbidden him as a mate. I managed to wriggle from his vile clutches by pretending business with Stilton Cheesewright, who was still nursing a broken heart after Florence Craye married Percy Gorringe as a second chance at love. Apparently, Percy had had a bit of a thing going with D’Arcy after Florence had divorced him for ‘irreconcilable differences.’

“Lucky man, Wooster,” said Stilton moodily, champing on a delicate hors d’ouevre like a masticating bovine in a spotless tuxedo.

“Right ho, Stilton,” I said, flushing a bit.  We’d been at school together and both of us knew what the other had got up to when we were very young men, before Jeeves shimmered into my life. And what we had gotten up to with each other shortly after Jeeves had left me. It had been fun, but not what either of us wanted, really. Stilton looked at me narrowly, then, and nodded, giving me a manly press of the shoulder. 

“I wish you luck, then.”  This was rummy because it’s what one usually says to the bride. I said so and he laughed. “Your secret is safe with me, Wooster.  Would it help you if I pretended to be angry with you for winning this beazel and threatened to butter the lawn with you again?”

This brought a genuine smile to the Wooster lips.  “Thank-you old chap, but I believe that Roger has that angle fully covered and accounted for.”

Stilton barked out a laugh and gave me a friendly slap on the shoulder that sent the willowy form careening into a large flower arrangement. It was a strong reminder of why we had been ill-suited as lovers, however big his heart is, and it is bally bigger than I had imagined.

“Bertie!” I jumped up guiltily. Tegwynne was using the scolding voice. Unlike Jeeves, she believed in having the iron hand in the spiked glove of steel, not a bit of velvet in sight.  “We should be leaving soon to catch our train.”

“Yes, right, rather,” I said, scampering to pull round the car like a docile and obedient husband.  We would be spending a month in Paris.  Tegwynne had chosen the hotel, and the heart had convulsed in an agony of grief.  It had been Jeeves’s and my favorite.  Luckily, she never seemed to pay too much attention to the Wooster emotions, preferring to regard me as a poorly trained lap dog in regular need of swatting with a rolled-up paper. Thus our trip to Paris was mostly uneventful.  She read a novel and I read Spinoza, except when I was fetching things for her and getting scolded.

 

Our wedding night was a bally disaster.  We’d never, well, you know, er, whatsit, of course, but Wooster had had a dashed lot of experience with the loving embrace and whatnot with Jeeves, and even before that with a lovely fellow called Ginger Winship, who had been at my wedding with his equally l. wife, who was an old school friend of Bobbie Wickham’s. Stilton had been a bit more rugged and athletic, but still quite preux and always genuinely sorry when he bruised the willowy frame in his enthusiasm. Tegwynne was having none of it.

She had bunged on a nightgown of the diaphanous type recommended for the wedding evening and whiffled into the bed, sitting primly with her hands folded and waiting for Wooster to dispose of himself.  I could see some of the more private bits of her through the thin fabric and the stomach churned and clenched in anxiety as my own private bits made a desperate bid to crawl back into the willowy corpus, eager for any refuge under the onslaught that threatened. How could I bring myself to touch such things as the ones she had under that nightgown? I was deuced anxious, biting the nails and twiddling the thumbs and twitching, but finally I had to come out of the bath, arrayed in a lovely new pair of orchid-colored silk pajamas.  They were highly fruity and I felt almost like myself for a few moments.

“Bertie!” I started and flailed. Dash it, she was using the scolding voice again.

“Yes, my dulcet darling?”

“Stop hopping around like an idiot, and don’t you ‘dulcet darling’ me!  What is the meaning of those… garments?”

“They are pajamas, “ I said humbly, bowing the golden pate liked a chastened schoolboy.  Her bosoms jiggled as she shouted, the little brown tips pointing at me like artillery.  What on earth could a right-thinking chap do with such things about the place?  Brrr.

“I see that!  They’re pink.  What man wears pink pajamas on his honeymoon?”

“The fellow at the store said they were orchid.  Not pink at all.”

Tegwynne made a sort of snorting noise and let me in the bed.  Then she bunged me good and hard with her novel when I tried to kiss her.  “None of that now, Bertie!  What do you think I am?”

“My wife?” I suggested diffidently, “Arrayed in bridal finery on our wedding night?”  I squared the shoulders and moved in to do the needful.

She smacked me again and then gave me quite a belt in the temple with one delicate little fist. I still have the scar from the engagement ring. Wooster retreated, tail between his cringing legs and went to sleep on the chastened and heartbroken chaise lounge in the dressing room. Tegwynne yelled at me for getting blood on the sheets.

I tossed and turned until dawn and then dressed quietly and left a note of fulsome apology for my temper, er, temerity, in biffing out to seek medical advice as my face was still bleeding.  The streets of Paris were nearly as familiar to me as London, and I was able to forget the horror awaiting me in my hotel and to pretend that I would find Jeeves there when I oozed back.  He had been such a bally gentle and attentive lover, full of soft words and loving, affectionate gestures.  This had come as a dashed surprise because there was certainly a bit of iron running through him when it came to keeping Wooster in line around the wardrobe, but he had been an absolute pet between the sheets from the first day. I’d been his first real lover, and he had gladly allowed me to lead him, eagerly learning all the things I liked and inventing new ones as we oozed along.  How I missed him!  I wished I could ask him what to do.

The tears were well up and flowing when I nipped around a corner and saw a bookstore.  It had been Jeeves’s favorite, and sitting there, on the stoop, his face the color of damp newspaper, reading a letter, was Jeeves.  I must have made a sort of strangled sound, because he looked up and I saw that it was my letter.  The tears started down his face as he opened his arms to me.  I ankled up to him and he brought me to the small apartment he was borrowing while he minded the shop.

 

**Jeeves**

At first, I thought that the pain of separating myself from Mr. Wooster would be temporary and grow less acute over time. Instead, the agony of missing him deepened with every passing day.  I could not bear the thought of him all alone, the absence in my bed, the aching loneliness that I knew could be assuaged just by hearing the cheerful tones of his beloved voice.  A brief, discreet, liaison with D’Arcy Cheesewright only reinforced my heart’s longing for Mr. Wooster’s gentle guidance in matters amatory. D’Arcy is a good-hearted and chivalrous lover, but lacked Mr. Wooster’s tender patience and had a tendency to leave unintentional bruises in sensitive regions.

As the first year of separation ended, I accepted a temporary job in Paris at my favorite book shop there, tending to it for three months in the owner’s absence.  It was an act of desperation and only partly successful. Two weeks before I would return to London, I received Mr. Wooster’s letters.  My heart melted at his loving words then shattered when I realized that I had failed him, that I had received everything a day too late to help him.  I was just registering the awful finality of our separation when his strangled cry of surprise made me look up.  Even though he had heard nothing from me in his hour of need, he came willingly to my embrace, and let me hold him in my lap while he explained everything and I offered what help I could.

He was extremely distressed at his feelings on seeing the nearly unclad form of his new wife.  Apparently her anatomy was a rather terrifying puzzle to him, but that I could assist him with.  I pulled a book out for him and showed him the illustrations. “Rather rummy how they build these beazels, what?” said Mr. Wooster, looking up at me.  My heart contracted at the sight of his poor, battered face.  “Do you really think she was just nervous?”

I really thought that she sounded enough of a harpy that I would gladly have entrusted Mr. Wooster to Honoria Glossop instead, but it would not do to say so. “It would not be unheard of, sir,” I said instead. 

“What does that bit do?” he asked, pointing to a portion of the feminine anatomy that, in my opinion, is best left veiled in mystery. I explained and his mouth flapped open.  “Rummy. I like your bits better, Reggie.” I agreed.

He leaned forward to kiss me then, and I let him, but then pulled back when he let his hands roam.  “You are married. I cannot make love to you and send you back to your wife.”

Mr. Wooster nodded, then rested his head on my shoulder. I put my arms around him, holding him and rubbing his back just the way he liked. “This is so dashed comforting,” he said.  “I can’t thank you enough for this, Reg.”

“Will you let me see to your face?”

“Yes, please.”  Mr. Wooster accepted my help and thanked me warmly.  “I miss you, Jeeves.  I bally well miss you.”  My heart contracted again and it felt like a stone sitting in my chest, but I kept my face calm for him.  He was already upset enough.

“Tell me about the wedding?” I took him back in my arms and listened carefully and then I fed him some breakfast and sent him back to his hotel with the book, now wrapped up in colorful paper.  “Come back to me if you need anything, anything at all. I am always here for you.”  He kissed me good-bye and I hugged him, then willed the tears back until he had closed the door.

 

**Bertie**

I ankled back to the hotel with the book, and some flowers, and a box of candy.  The manager remembered me—and Jeeves—and asked how I was biffing along.  His face grew very grave when I explained that I had married and he gasped, in a very discreetly French manner, when I said I was in the honeymoon suite. Tegwynne had apparently already made quite an impression on the staff, rather like the one Cromwell made on the Welsh corgies, or the Norman crumpets or whatnot.

On entering the suite, it seemed that there had been something of an altercation.  Quite a number of items had been misplaced or broken and Tegwynne was sitting, dressed and white-faced with rage, her hands folded in her lap.

“How dare you!” she hissed.

“Ah, er, whatsit?”  I tried to hand over the flowers, but she hit me with them, spraying leaves and petals about the wreckage of the room. 

“You abandoned me on our honeymoon.”

“I say!” I said.  That was a bit ripe, after all. I had only been gone for three or four hours, and I am sure she was asleep for most of them as it was still well before the usual hour of breakfast she had decreed.

“I have been here for nearly thirty minutes wondering what happened to you.  No note, not a word of any kind.”

Thirty minutes?!  Nearly thirty minutes? It took her longer than that to dress. “There was a note,” I said feebly.  “I left it on the tea table.” I flapped a hand to where it sat, unopened.

“You foul beast!  I hate you! Daddy is on his way, and Roger.”

I started, sending the candy and book flying.  “Won’t it take them half a day to get here?” A bally large fist connected with the side of the Wooster noggin at this juncture, thus disabusing W. of that notion. The willowy form crashed to the floor, and little birds and stars commenced to circling the skull as Roger’s shoes made contact with the slender ribs.

He stopped as Tegwynne flung herself on him, weeping piteously. In a trice, he had her suit jacket open and was running his hands over the bosoms and up under her skirt. She started babbling in Roger’s arms as he ran his hands quite expertly over the bits that had so puzzled Wooster. Roger seemed to have little troubling figuring out how to work them, almost like he was born to it and she purred and arched the back eagerly to give him better access as he squeezed and rubbed. “Oh, Roger, darling! I am so sorry I doubted you.” I was beginning to blush at the fondling unfolding before the tender eyes. Bally interesting, what, but perhaps not for everyone. Brrr.

Mr. Rourke, Tegwynne’s father pushed into the room just then, kicking the willowy form in passing. Bertram doubled up in agony.

“We’ll take you for every cent you have, Wooster,” he said in a fashion that would have made Stilton Cheesewright hie for the hills.

“I believe not, sir,” said a voice. I almost wept.  It was Jeeves.  He had come to rescue me.

**Jeeves**

Mr. Wooster left his whangee in my apartment and I took the opportunity to follow him back to his hotel.  I do not know what I thought, or hoped, only that I had to see him again as soon as I could. I happened into the hallway just as the hotel manager reached the doorway in response to a maid who had been frightened by the fighting. Nothing could have prepared me for the horror that had awaited Mr. Wooster. The room was a shambles. A young couple were in the process of tearing at each other’s clothes on the divan. Mr. Wooster lay, doubled up on the floor while a large man kicked him. I nearly flew into a rage at the sight of him mistreating the person most dear to me in all the world, but I sent one of the maids to phone a doctor, then I considered my fault in all this. How could I have been so careless of this most precious man ever to walk the earth?

When I recalled the one time we had occupied the honeymoon suite there, the three days of tender lovemaking punctuated by long talks and walks along the Seine, I had to suppress a cry.  How could I have been so foolish as to think that he could escape situations like this on his own?  He is too kind and generous to even suspect that people are capable of behaving with such anger and self-centeredness.

Resisting the urge to immediately gather Mr. Wooster up from the carpet and cradle him in my arms, I calmly informed Miss Rourke’s father that, as she had not permitted the marital union to be consummated and she was accepting the affections of another, the marriage would be viewed as legally void. Thankfully, the hotel staff were only too happy to assist me by asserting that Mr. Wooster had been ejected from the room in the wee hours of the morning and that Miss Rourke had been caught _in delicto flagrante_ with her former lover. I then, very strongly, suggested that Mr. Rourke would do well to lift his ban on Tegwynne's marriage to Roger, whom she obviously preferred to Mr. Wooster. The young woman, I would hesitate to call her a lady, thanked me warmly for my interference and threw her engagement ring at Mr. Wooster, then dragged her lover into the bedchamber to consummate their union before her father changed his mind. Their marriage took place that evening and I am given to understand that they get on quite well together, although they are unable to retain household staff.

A courier delivered Mr. Wooster’s annulment papers later that afternoon, by which time the hotel staff had righted the honeymoon suite and installed Mr. Wooster in his usual rooms.  While the doctor saw to him, I contacted Mr. Wooster’s solicitors to take an action against Miss Rourke’s lover and father for assaulting my employer. The American millionaire was only too happy to settle the matter without involving the courts.  I made another call to D’Arcy Cheesewright, who quietly had Roger blacklisted at those of his clubs where Mr. Wooster was also a member and let it be known that Tegwynne had abandoned her husband on their wedding night.

 

**Bertie**

The willowy form seethed with bruises and two ribs had been cracked by the force of Tegwynne’s lover and father.  I was well shut of them. Once the commotion died down, and the doctor patched me up, Jeeves floated in, gently lifted me from the chaise and helped glide me to my regular rooms, the ones he usually shared with me.  I could not bear to stay there alone.  The heart would break.

“Please Reggie, please don’t leave me,” I whispered as a maid unlocked the door and the bellhop disposed my luggage.

“It’s all right now,” said Jeeves, resting me atop the covers of my bed and chivvying the staff from the room.  He shimmered in with my orchid colored pajamas and I turned my head away.  He biffed back and returned with another set, this one a rather fruity pastel paisley.  “Would you like a bath?” The eyes filled and I shook my head.  Jeeves helped me undress and put on the pajamas, and as he settled me under the covers, I caught his wrist. “Oh, darling,” he breathed in a very shaky way, then he shed the outer togs and crawled in beside me in his underthings, gathering me against him as though I was his greatest love and treasure.  “I am so sorry for leaving you.  Do you want to rest now?”

“I miss you so much, Reggie.  Thank-you for fishing me out of the soup.”  He stroked the golden hair and kissed the forehead and rubbed the back, just the way he knew I liked to be held and touched. “I love you. Thank-you.”

“I love you, too, darling.  Please don’t be distressed.  I have you now and it is safe to rest.”

Suddenly, I was almost frantic. “But for how long, Reg?  I… I can’t waste this time if you’re here.  I never get to speak with you like in the old…” At the thought of how much I missed just chatting to him, the face crumpled and I was sobbing against him like a heartbroken child. He froze at first because he had never seen me cry like this before, and it was probably just as dashed shocking to him that I was that torn up about our daily chats, more upset about that than any of the other things I’d lost when he oozed away. “I miss hearing your voice, your guidance,” I managed to gasp.

“Shh, darling, please calm yourself.”  He held me until I quieted, caressing the willowy form and saying soft things as he kissed me again and again. “I love you, Bertie. I have you now.” 

“How long?” I asked again, not caring how plaintive I sounded. “How long can I see you?  Can we talk for a while before you have to go?”

The tears welled up in his eyes and spilled over. “Oh, my dearest love and treasure, of course we can talk. I will stay with you as long as you like. I could not bear to be parted from you again.”

He had to repeat himself a few times before I really understood what he was saying, and then he had to explain what he had been doing for the past year, saying good-bye to his friends and family and leaving them with some means of floating if they lost work because of him. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have helped you.”

Jeeves blushed a deep ruddy red.  “I did not realize until I saw you again, sir. I was doing these things without understanding myself.  I never see as clearly when you are not with me.”

“Will you take off your underthings and let me look at you all naked?”

He laughed and started to unbutton his undershirt.  “I’d like to ask you the same favor.”

“Will you help me undress?”

“Of course.”  
  


**Jeeves**

To this day, I cannot believe how readily Mr. Wooster forgave me for leaving him and accepted me back into his life.  There would be much to discuss as neither of us had made plans to relocate from England, but those matters would wait.  At my lover’s request, I bared our bodies, and we saw and touched each other intimately for the first time in over a year.  The moment when I held him against me, our bare skins touching, I burst into tears of absolute relief.

“We’ve become rather soppy, Reg,” said Mr. Wooster, as he dried my tears and kissed me.  “Are you quite all right?”  I assured him that I was.  “Can we make gentle love to one another?”  My breath quickened and we kissed, rubbing against each other, careful not to jar Mr. Wooster’s damaged ribs.  We touched and caressed each other, pausing often to speak and kiss.  When I cupped his intimate parts in a hand he gasped and flinched for a moment, then relaxed under my gentle attentions.  Once we had both climaxed and I held him in my arms, I asked him what he had meant by that flinch.

“The same as you did by yours, Reg.  You seem to know yourself... well, D’Arcy pinches when he gets overly excited.”  My mouth flapped open and Mr. Wooster smiled.  “I kept a close eye on you those first months, Reg.  I was just so bally frightened that you would do something foolish when you got lonely.”  I felt a deep blush suffuse my body.

“Did he…did you?”

“No, Reg, he never said anything to me explicitly, but I knew.  I could tell by the way he tried to be gentle with me that he’d been with you first.  And you had said yourself that you tried another and it didn’t answer.” We snuggled and petted each other, amused that we had each taken the same lover while we were separated. “What will become of him do you think?” 

I paused and kissed Mr. Wooster’s nose as he looked earnestly at me.  D’Arcy Cheesewright was a good man and deserving of happiness.  “It would be awkward to have him visit,” I finally offered.

“Not if you find him the right mate, Reg.  Will you try?”

No one with a heart could refuse that earnest look. “Of course, darling.  I will try.”

“Would you nestle me gently, Reg?  My ribs are starting to ache.”

“With very great pleasure.”

As I settled my lover against my shoulder and soothed him to sleep in my arms for the first time in many months, no thought entered my mind except his comfort and well-being.  We would face many challenges, I knew, but for those next few weeks, we concentrated only on loving each other.  To this day, when I see Mr. Wooster’s beloved face resting against me in sleep, I think back to that day of reunion with the deepest possible gratitude for his kind generosity and loving forgiveness.


End file.
